


Stars Burn Out

by theskywasblue



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Drabble, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-17
Updated: 2018-10-17
Packaged: 2019-08-03 08:43:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16322969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theskywasblue/pseuds/theskywasblue
Summary: Dean can feel every individual molecule in his body, and they’re all screaming





	Stars Burn Out

**Author's Note:**

> I just think that having an archangel forcibly ejected from your body would be really rough, okay? I don't know how they're planning to do it on the show (though I have my suspicions) but...yeah. Also I love Dean more when he's suffering. Don't @ me.

_Angel inside you - it’s kinda like being chained to a comet._

Dean hasn’t thought about those words in years, but the description seems...mild, now, in comparison to what he’s feeling. Maybe it’s different for Archangels. Maybe it’s just different for Dean. It hurts to breathe, it hurts to think. Dean can feel every individual molecule in his body, and they’re all _screaming_.

“Sorry,” Cas murmurs, softly, as Dean flinches away from the washcloth. The water feels like acid running down his spine, but he can’t flinch away from that without pulling his bones from his skin. Every touch is bright and terrible, like tonguing the pulp of a broken tooth, but everywhere. 

Dean tries not to focus on that, though fuck, it’s hard to think of anything beyond the cocoon of pain. He tries to focus on sounds, instead, which exist outside himself. Not his own ragged breathing, but the way it echoes off the close tile walls of the motel bathroom; not the sensation of water on his back like nails dragging through his skin, but the sound the droplets make as the hit the surface of the water in the tub. The rasp and bark of someone coughing in the next room over, the scratch of tires on the gravel in the parking lot…

The air sticks in his throat, the muscles in his back spasm in agony. “Sorry,” Cas says, again, reaching around to drape the washcloth over the faucet. His arms are pale with his sleeves rolled up, his fingers wrinkled from the water. There’s still blood underneath his fingernails. “I think that’s all we can do for now.”

He hates that Cas has to see him like this; but it would be worse if it was Sam, or Mom, or almost anybody else. Cas has seen him with his soul flayed open; it’s impossible, Dean thinks, for anything to be worse than that.

Something about the look on Cas’ face, though, suggests that he’s wrong; but Cas doesn’t say so. He helps Dean dry off - gentle, so gentle that it almost hurts more, the towel like sandpaper across his skin, muscles screaming with the effort it takes to hold Dean upright - then across the eight, maybe ten feet from the bathroom to the bed. The blankets feel like a layer of lead across his chest, or the dirt they toss over a coffin; he can’t stand it. Instead he just lies there on top of the covers and shakes. Shakes from the cold and the pain, and the hollow feeling in his bones, like having Michael burned out of him has left him scraped hollow and cauterized on the inside. 

_Angel inside you - it’s kinda like being chained to a comet_

An archangel, though? More like standing on the surface of the sun when it goes supernova.


End file.
